Effulgence
by Blkwonderwoman
Summary: She thinks it started with the sun, this fascination of hers with saving the world. - A character study and brief history of my original character, Rose Laveau.


She thinks it started with the sun, this fascination of hers with saving the world.

Her sun was warm, harsh, vibrant and violent. It healed, melted— but also grew, fostered, and coaxed. It rested deep inside of her breastbone softly beating like a second heart.

The Laveau name bore responsibility. When her peers had been playing with the latest omnic piece of technology Rose had been chopping up thyme, or consecrating rooms of endless vases, mirrors and jars under her mother's tutelage. Magic took practice she would say. It was something you built upon until you were high enough to reach the stars, and Rose had wanted the sun, she had always wanted the sun.

Even with robotic intelligence, floating star-crafts, bases on the moon, and the illusion of world peace— people still feared her heat. Feared the burning in her eyes as she wished someone well, fear that she saw in their smiles when she saw them the next day and things had gone as she had predicted.

"Gifted," her mother had said. "Prodigious and kind."

"Freak," the children would say— and more often than not, nothing at all.

—

She watched racing because the uniforms were iron-hot red and there was a fearlessness in the driver's eyes that reminded her of her own. It wasn't magic, it was NASCAR but NASCAR made it easier to make friends.

She wore kyanite when she wanted to speak her truth, bedazzled her dresses in drops of citrine when she was feeling low, and began wearing neither when she felt those things slowly become inherent in her spirit, in her being.

Her mother told her it was time.

The ancestral shrine on her bedroom window had been moved to the basement, down waiting with priestesses and conjurers she had seen at the market. She had never pushed her presence onto them and they had returned the same courtesy— or so she had thought.

Warm smiles greeted her as she sat in the middle of the group.

"It's time for you to meet her, Rose."

It was the easiest she had ever slipped into meditation. The hums of her ancestors drawing her further and further into herself until she saw it, the sun at her core, as hot and fiery as she had imagined.

"Take it, Rose." Marie had whispered. How she knew it was Marie Laveau was simple, no one else had gotten this far, it was for them and them alone. She knew this now.

She bloomed.

—

After that day, not even NASCAR could keep others near her. She radiated heat, her presence humid, stifling and impossible to ignore. She began watching things that included physical contact, romantic comedies with passionate kisses— which she soon became bored of. Figure skating— which soon felt too impersonal to her, the skaters faces too stiff and smiles too false.

She finally found a haven in pro-wrestling. The contact was always purposeful and engaging even if it was staged.

Any touch she craved.

Mardi Gras, which was spent crushed between endless throngs of bodies, became an outlet for her. Her adolescence was colored in hidden kisses and touches that were never prolonged enough, never as complete as she wanted. Her skin burned hands, her lips singed tongues.

Soon pro-wrestling didn't help much either, but old favorites like Naomi and the Rock had sated her burning which could have easily become violent and misdirected. The static from the 30-year old recordings rocked her to sleep many a night.

—

Nothing lasted forever, as even the sun would one day wane, and eventually people in town began coming to her for help. At first, people came that needed simple things, like love potions, charms to attract wealth, and sometimes a place to stay from the dark and abusive hands of black-holed people. Rose provided much and was given much in return, but when she was younger and eager for this power she had not considered that the planets that were richest in life kept far away from the Sun's reach. No one stayed longer than to give a strained thank you and a payment. Coins dropped into her palm, the barest impression of touch as she felt the lingering heat on the cool, old currency.

So, maybe that's why when a recruiter for the Omnic suppression forces had rolled into town she had not been surprised when they came to her doorstep, and was even less surprised when she herself accepted their offer.

"If you leave now you won't come back whole again." Her mother said before she left.

Rose knew better than to dismiss her mother's warnings as useless adages, but she went anyway. She could see the future too, and there were warm people like her where she was going.

—

Nursing was a thankless, endless job.

There was never enough supplies and never enough unbloodied hands, but Rose always found herself breathing above it all, buoyed by her natural talents and the sun that coursed through her veins.

When they ran out of antibiotic, Rose brewed garlic, leek, and bile into a replacement. When someone had a complex fracture Rose was able to piece them back together quicker than anyone. Her magic grew in strength with every bone she set and wound she stitched back, but even with so many other bright people around her she still felt people shy away from her.

"Hold back, just a little. Let people figure things out on their own, it makes them feel just as important." A young woman named Mercy had told her.  
She was the head of the medical bay, her own fire something so brilliant Rose found herself listening to her advice.

When she hinted at a possible cure she received smiles and answers, when she helped carry another wounded man instead of finding her own she was invited to poker games after her shift. And, on the chance that she did rise to the occasion, she was praised instead of envied.

Mercy soon left, to mentor others across the world on different fronts that needed her, but Rose continued to take her advice to heart.

—

She had golden hair, taupe skin, and a warm, bright smile.

When Rose found her checked into med-bay for the first time, the woman had thanked god for having such a beautiful nurse. Rose hadn't hidden her smile from her, and she hadn't hidden the dainty, lingering touches she gave her during her stay either.

Her name was Ava.

Rose had never had someone so close to her without shying away.

—

There were many like her, hot-blooded people that defended her as she dragged their teammates from the field. She even returned the favor on a few occasions.

"You're a pretty good shot, kid," said a young man with a Texan drawl and a thick leather hat on despite the hurricane season''s overcast clouds.

She had picked up the gun on reflex when she saw an Omnic get up,one that she previously thought was disposed of, and had finished the job before it could get to a new recruit. They had all received basic combat training, even as medics, but to end another being's life— mechanical or not— felt strange to her, foreign. For once she had taken something away, with her own hands and she was unsure what to feel.

Despite this, the sun in her continued to thrive.

—

McCree, as he was called, often sat next to her in the mess. When he wasn't busy with missions outside of dismantling the factory he was pouring Splenda on everything he could get his hands on. "Southern connection," he would say as if that made all the difference. Rose considered that maybe it did when she saw the haughtiness of people who may have been too used to technology running their lives and cleaning up after them. Even the senior officers had that air about them.

There was a Mason Dixon line in the mess hall, and where it was depended on who passed the tabasco sauce around and who didn't. At least there were people to talk about NASCAR with.

"You're a lunatic if you think Diaz ain't makin' it to nationals." McCree said pouring packet after packet of Splenda into his already sweetened iced tea. It sunk to the bottom and made a crunchy, grainy noise against the cup as he stirred it.

Rose grimaced and sipped her own tea. "He's too preoccupied."

McCree slurped his straw and crunched the fake sugar between his teeth. "Yeah, what makes you say that?"

"Just a hunch," she said.

She had gotten used to using euphemisms for what her magic told her, it made people less suspicious of her. The lies like the bottomless well of kindness she had begun to draw from other nurses. Strange, but a necessity to her now.

"Bet on it," he sad.

Needless to say, Diaz dropped out a week before finals. McCree had cursed and handed her a twenty.

—

The war continued on with no end in sight. The Omnic factories in the south were still operational and the troops were already tired. Rose was busier than ever, her remedies had been adapted for full-use when resources were low, but even that couldn't stop death from knocking on their door week after week.

Soon people like McCree were shipped out for other facilities where they were needed most. Rose wondered how bad things must have been wherever they were being shipped off to when things were already so bad where she was standing.

Ava was a comfort, an anchor to keep her from floating away. Rose thanked her in the little private time she had to herself and held her tight in her arms when she could. Sometimes she thought she held her too tightly.

She still thought about the omnic, and meditated long and hard about its death and what it meant. The universe spoke back in whispers so quiet that she had thought she hadn't heard them at all.

Of course there was always an answer. Rose found more and more she was seeing answers in smaller things. A group of Omnics breaking into base camp and her defending the medical bay with her fellow nurses had been one of them. No one told her she belonged in the field, no one told her to pick up a gun, but she felt the answer in the pull of the trigger and the pull of the various sinew of muscle she put back together after they were torn apart. She was between life and death, closer to her sun than she'd ever thought she would be.

—

It happened on a Wednesday, she had never liked Wednesday's. They often were too in-between everything to ever have any good come out of them.

They were on the precipice. Close enough to the factory that victory was within reach. Rose had been successful in most of her missions, her magic had never failed her and neither had her team. They advanced early afternoon, the anticipation snapping and crackling in the air with every gun shot and omnic felled.

She had seen it before it would happen, much too soon to do anything about it. She saw gold, saw the blue of the blaster, and the pool of red that draped around Ava's form.

She broke formation and ran, her team covering for her.

Ava was losing too much blood for a simple operation, too much light from her eyes was fading for Rose's next actions to be anything but crucial.

There was always a consequence to using magic without a conduit that could handle the brunt of the task. There were limits. Rose broke hers.

She channeled the sun, deep within her chest, felt it pour out of her lungs and onto her hands that were caked in Ava's blood. She prayed to Marie to guide her, to make it work. She could feel it go wrong as soon the heat was leeched from her bones, snatched from her right hand as cold snaked up into her arm like so many crystals of ice.

Her arm froze and she felt her world crumble before she passed out.

—

Ava made a full recovery, her arm fully intact.

Rose had had to amputate.

She was told that the cells in her right arm were unresponsive, the tissue dying and eating away at that which had once been alive. Rose felt the eclipse, felt the coolness at her center that could not be abated.

She could feel the lost weight when she woke up the day after the operation. No one would look her in the eye, not even Ava.  
It was odd being the one on the bed, looking up at everything or anything that distracted her from looking to the empty right side of her. She could still feel the phantom limb of her magic struggle in vain, she begged for it to stop night after night.

She could no longer cast.

Their unit won three days later and Rose was discharged shortly after.

—

The prosthetic was heavy.

Not in its design or physical weight, but its lack of tangible feeling.

In the many eyes that followed her, pinning into its false tendons and muscle.

In the Veteran's benefit check she received from Overwatch shortly after returning home, and in the notes from fellow soldiers that she chose to ignore, piling up on her bedside table.

Most of all, its cool weight was the only thing she felt internally anymore. Her magic, her sun, was pitch black.

—

She felt untethered and unfeeling for months.

The garden around her house outgrowing itself until the neighbors cut it for her out of pity.

She walked over the trimmed grass barefoot and pricked her toes on the cut and torn remains of dead dahlias.

She meditated to nothing.

—

Her old community that had once welcomed her, that had once huddled around her warmth like newborns were now as cold and tight as the lightweight steel that made up her arm.

Her mother spoke to her only when needed and eventually even that was deemed unnecessary.

Unseemly, too smooth, too refined, inorganic— the weight of her arm was why she was abandoned, left alone in a house that she didn't want watching the garden she once loved being trimmed away weekly by unknown neighbors.

—

When the grass was overgrown again, Rose sat in the center of it, trimming it with her fingernails.

"I like your arm, Miss." A boy said to her.

The words took her by surprise, and it took her a moment to process them. Before she could respond, he had already run off.

His father returned with him in tow, riding on his lawn mower that was much too outdated, a prosthetic steering the wheel while his organic held his son close to him. He tipped his hat to Rose and she nodded in turn before retreating to her porch to watch them work.

The boy waved when they finished mowing and Rose hesitated before waving back.

—

A year had passed and she felt like the grass, new, displaced, and aching for sunlight. The people around her, the ones that she had left home to protect had gotten by after the outbreak, but just barely.

The man she saw with the prosthetic was an anomaly. Many had lost homes, appendages, or both to the battles that had come too close and many more came from different towns away from what the small war had wrought.

When Rose went into town, for the first time in months, there were many open hands and hungry bellies and she did her best to fill them.

When she got home she opened her benefit's check and wrote a letter.

—

One of the worst parts about coming home had been seeing the empty spaces. Her magic was not the only one that had gone.

Many conjurers she had grown up seeing had moved elsewhere.

The children in town were the bare-bone imitations, the only proof that they had ever been there. They played "witch" and claimed card tricks were the ultimate proof of sorcery making faux potions out of gatorade and skittles.

It wasn't real magic, it didn't have to be. Smiles healed all things in time, and Rose saw the sun leak through the gaps in their grins.

—

Her check had afforded her three more prosthetics, a band aid to a wound that was only deepening with time.

She left them at people's homes while they were gone, no one needed to know they were from her. She had no desire to be the overbearing sun again.

She wrung herself dry thinking of new ways to earn money, searched her aging home for answers. All she found were old clothes, rotting from mothballs and mites. She shook off a singular black hat and held it up the the light. Children ran outside the window laughing.

Rose went out to join them, and pulled a rabbit that had been hiding under her house out of her hat.

—

Tricks were simple, they required little real magic and more creativity and forward thinking.

She performed in town and people began throwing her change, from pennies to quarters to dollars. When she pulled a dozen bright red roses from a girl's afro she had to carry the money home in her top hat instead of her pockets.

Maybe it was because technology had eclipsed what had once been esoteric and unknown, it had made miracles seem constant, but there was always a predictability to it. Even when Omnics rebelled it was something that could be expected and planned. There was no such parameter for magic, and it was that indiscernible feeling about Rose's shows that drew people.

—

She began building up again. Reconstructing what she thought she had lost in what she gave away, and the smiles she got in return. For once, she stayed in the orbit of others happiness and felt herself budding again.

She told herself she was ready, could feel again a life in her that she thought had gone barren.

For the first time in a long time she meditated, and for the first time in a long time she saw the sun.

"Welcome back, Rose." Marie said.

Rose smiled and yielded to the warmth. 


End file.
